How AI Could Reshape Brand Design in Consumer Goods: Study
Consumer goods companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence to automate marketing copy, streamline design, and optimize campaigns. A new study from Adobe, which surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers in March 2025, found that AI-driven branding strategies are influencing shopping behavior, including impulse purchases.
Color, specifically, is key. Sixteen percent of consumers say they notice a brand’s color scheme before anything else, and half admit to choosing one brand over another based solely on color.
There’s one constant in Adobe’s findings — blue stands out as the most trusted brand color. Blue was the most likely color to trigger impulse buys (31%), followed by black (28%), gold (27%), red (26%) and silver (26%).
Design Gets an AI Boost
AI is increasingly becoming the engine behind design decisions. Nearly one in five consumers (18%) believe AI-generated color palettes will soon guide most branding choices. With AI tools now able to generate, test and personalize color strategies in real time, designers and marketers will be able to automate efforts through insight-driven processes.
Estée Lauder Cos. is one such company working with Adobe to streamline content production processes, allowing creative teams to focus more on ideation and creating new design concepts. It is implementing a suite of generative AI-powered tools for visual content creation into its workflows to enhance efficiency and accelerate campaign execution.
L’Oreal’s use of generative AI technology is taking its concept creation timeline from weeks to days, expediting creative ideation by using image models from Google. This has allowed L’Oreal teams to generate visuals that align with the company’s brand identities by simply describing marketing ideas via prompts.
Still, AI-driven branding is receiving mixed results. Thirty-four percent of respondents said they trust brands that use fully AI-generated branding. An additional 30% associate AI-driven branding with modernity and efficiency.
Not everyone is convinced. Twenty-three percent consider AI-generated palettes a passing trend, while 20% believe they lack the emotional depth of human-crafted designs.
Futuristic, AI-inspired tones, such as metallics, iridescents, and sci-fi shades, are likely to trend, coming in stark contrast with the earthy tones like browns, sage greens and terracottas that are also predicted to strike a chord with consumers.
